An I/O idea (good idea)

[enty8080]

What are you thinking about making user input easily:

• Now:
  a = (read-upto "\n")[:-1]
• Why you don’t want to make it easily:
  a = read()
  ?

[krader1961]

Because

a) your proposal isn't valid elvish syntax,

b) your proposal is less flexible, and

c) a "read line function that discards the trailing newline" is now trivial to write:

fn readline {
    put (read-upto "\n")[:-1]
}

Whether readline would be useful enough to be predefined is unclear.

[enty8080]

Okey, but what about read builtin? Like read-upto, but without upto with this syntax:
a = (read)
?

[krader1961]

Okey, but what about read builtin?

You've just renamed readline to read. Personally, if people think this would be used often enough to be worth adding to the core implementation I think it should be named readline. Alternatively, a generalized read that also supports displaying a prompt, similar to what @hhanche posted on Gitter, might be worth adding.

[zzamboni]

@enty8080 I actually asked @xiaq about this in the Telegram group:

zzamboni: Any chance to introduce a readline while you are at it? I now am using a wrapper around read-upto "\n", so I hope it should be simple :)

xiaq I'm not sure - while it's a convenience, I'd like to keep the built-in module small
You can just define it as fn read-line { read-upto "\n" }, right?

Which is OK with me. The readline function you propose is trivial to write, like @krader1961 mentioned.

[krader1961]

@xiaq, It seems like this can be closed since commit 5a09222 implemented a read-line command that works regardless whether the platform uses \n or \r\n to terminate lines. See also issue #975.